Last Monday we decommissioned IRC.Mozilla.org for good, closing the book on a 22-year-long chapter of Mozilla’s history as we started a new one in our new home on Matrix. [...] About three weeks ago [...] we turned on federation, connecting Mozilla to the rest of the Matrix ecosystem.

I wasn’t in the room when IRC.mozilla.org was stood up, but from what I’ve heard IRC wasn’t “chosen” so much as it was the obvious default, the only tool available in the late ’90s. Suffice to say that as a globally distributed organization, Mozilla has relied on IRC as our main synchronous communications tool since the beginning. For much of that time it’s served us well, if for some less-than-ideal values of “us” and “well”.

Like a lot of the early internet IRC is a quasi-standard protocol built with far more of the optimism of the time than the paranoia the infosec community now refers to as “common sense”, born before we learned how much easier it is to automate bad acts than it is to foster healthy communities.

IRC’s [...] ongoing borderline-unusability is a direct product of a notion of openness that leaves admins few better tools than endless spammer whack-a-mole. [...] “Working in the open”, [back in the days] where computation was scarce and expensive, meant working in front of an audience that was lucky enough to:

• go to university or college;
• whose parents could afford a computer at home;
• who lived somewhere with broadband; or
• had one of the few jobs whose company opened low-numbered ports to the outside world.

What it didn’t mean was [today's]:

• doxxing;
• cyberstalking;
• botnets;
• gamergaters;
• weaponized social media tooling;
• carrier-grade targeted-harassment-as-a-service; and
• state-actor psy-op/disinformation campaigns rolling by like bad weather.

The relentless, grinding day-to-day malfeasance that’s the background noise of this grudgefuck of a zeitgeist we’re all stewing in just didn’t inform that worldview, because it didn’t exist. [...] We’re definitely not going to find any answers [to what we mean by "open" and its implications for community members] that matter to the present day, much less to the future, if the only place we’re looking is backwards.